What I Didn’t Know Then
Music by Gabriel Walker
Brian Hassett is the author of a Beat Trilogy — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac, How The Beats Begat The Pranksters and On The Road with Cassadys, as well as Blissfully Ravaged in Democracy: Adventures in Politics – 1980–2020, and Holy Cats! Dream-Catching at Woodstock. He helped put together and wrote two of the keynote essays for The Rolling Stone Book of The Beats, and wrote the Grateful Dead chapter in Kerouac on Record. His poetry has appeared in numerous books, literary reviews and magazines spanning four decades. He spent six years as an Executive Aide-de-Camp at MTV Networks, and the last three years touring North America with original Merry Prankster George Walker doing a “Jack & Neal Ride Again” show performing Kerouac & Cassady live on stage.
He was the producer and host of many live Beat-related shows in Greenwich Village and elsewhere from the 1990s through the 2000s, and has been a producer of bona fide Acid Tests on and off from 1978 to 2019. (Photo by Jim Musselman.)